Blessed Anna Maria Taigi

Blessed Anna Maria Taigi was a wife and mother of seven children, a Trinitarian tertiary and a mystic, who spent almost all her life in Rome. For nearly half a century she kept a poor household and bore with her husband’s difficult temper, and both simple people and cardinals came to her for counsel. The Church commemorates her on June 9.

She was born in Siena on May 29, 1769, the daughter of the apothecary Luigi Giannetti and of Maria Santa Masi. When her father fell into poverty, the family moved to Rome, and six-year-old Anna made the journey on foot. She attended the school run by the Maestre Pie, and as a young girl she went into service to help her parents.

At the age of twenty, with her parents’ consent, she married Domenico Taigi, a servant in the household of the Chigi family. The apostolic letter of her beatification describes him as pious and honest, but rough and hard to live with, and the Roman Martyrology speaks of a violent husband who oppressed her. Anna Maria obeyed him and sought to win him for God. She bore four sons and three daughters; several of them died in infancy. She worked with her own hands to support the children.

In the first years of her marriage, to please her husband, she liked to wear elegant clothes, but soon she felt that God was calling her to a different life. In the church of San Marcello she met a Servite priest who strengthened her in this resolve. She gave up finery and, with her husband’s consent, received the habit of the Third Order of the Most Holy Trinity in the church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane. She took up severe penances, and when her confessor forbade her excesses, she obeyed at once.

She did not neglect her duties as wife and mother. She rose early, received Holy Communion in a nearby church, and at dawn returned to her household tasks. She bore insults and slander, striving to repay them with good. Though she herself lived in want, she helped those in need, and in times of public and private calamity she offered herself to God for others.

The apostolic letter speaks of her frequent ecstasies and mystical gifts. For forty-seven years she saw before her eyes something like a sun, in whose light she came to know distant and future things and the secrets of consciences. People of every walk of life asked her advice on spiritual and temporal matters, and she received them while doing her housework. Princes, Church dignitaries and cardinals also called for her, and many sinners were converted through her.

After a long illness she died in Rome on June 9, 1837, as she herself had foretold. She was buried in the Verano cemetery and later, in keeping with her wish to rest in a church of the Trinitarians, she was moved to the basilica of San Crisogono in Trastevere. Pius X recognized her heroic virtues in 1906, and Benedict XV beatified her on May 30, 1920. In the apostolic letter he wrote that her example shows that no state of life closes the way to Christian perfection.